The Italian club bands: the circuit that trained the trumpets

THE CLUB-BAND WORLD · THE FORMATION GROUND, AT MUSIC SIZE

Mishawaka's most consequential music institution had no charter. It was the Italian club band: the working dance-and-banquet bands of the city's Italian clubs, in which a rubber worker could play trumpet at night and his sons could grow up in a house where instruments were kept. The People record of this history holds the persons whole, and they are not re-dug here; what belongs to this section is the circuit itself, as the formation ground of a documented output no conservatory in the region matched. Out of one Mishawaka house came Pete Candoli, born 1923, and his brother Conte, born 1927 — their father a rubber-plant worker who played in a local Italian club band and kept instruments in the home; Pete largely self-taught and his younger brother's first teacher; both boys went to Woody Herman's First Herd, Conte joining as a teenage summer fill-in in 1944 and taking the chair full-time on graduating in 1945, sitting beside Pete, who was already there. The brothers' careers — the great bands, the Los Angeles studios, Conte in Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show band from 1968, the joint induction into the International Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997, which the Halls of Fame record of this history carries — belong to their persons. The civic fact belongs here: the training system that produced two of the most recorded trumpets of the big-band century was a Mishawaka club circuit, unpaid, unrecorded, and gone — its existence provable chiefly by what walked out of it.

The circuit's second documented graduate makes the point from another instrument. Remo Belli, born and raised in Mishawaka, took up drums at twelve and was playing professionally at sixteen; his uncle played trumpet at one of the city's Italian clubs — the same club-band world, the People record states expressly — and Belli's course ran to Los Angeles, the professional jazz drummer's life behind singers such as Anita O'Day, and then to the invention that carries his name out of his Hollywood drum shop: the synthetic drumhead, developed with Sam Muchnick of Evansville's greenhouse-film work behind it in the record's telling — the Remo head that sits under nearly every drummer alive. A club circuit that produced a First Herd trumpet section and the modern drumhead is not a footnote to a small city's music; it is the center of it, and the record's failure to preserve a single club band's name, roster or photograph at naming strength is this section's sharpest named gap. The settling sources are the clubs' own survivals — the DeAmicis and DiLoreto records the Culture leg names as the two Italian Mishawakas — and the Enterprise's amusement columns.

Sources:

1. The People record of this history — the Candoli brothers entry (the father's club band, the instruments in the house, the Herman course); the Remo Belli entry (the uncle at the Italian club, professionally at sixteen, Drum City and the drumhead); carried here at formation size, the persons standing there whole.
2. The Halls of Fame record of this history — the brothers' joint induction into the International Jazz Hall of Fame, 1997, pointer only.
3. The Culture record of this history — the two Italian Mishawakas (DeAmicis and DiLoreto) as the circuit's institutional frame.